Outpost of Diplomacy: A History of the Embassy

Political scientist Berridge (Diplomacy) provides a broad overview of diplomacy’s cornerstone—the resident embassy. Noting that the first embassies appeared during the Renaissance as “Italy’s five great powers”—Milan, Venice, Florence, Naples, and the papacy—sought to end years of fighting, Berridge describes the original career ambassadors as gentry-born lawyers and ecclesiastics who lived abroad without family. In the 16th century, envoys began bringing their wives to foreign posts, where they became “indispensable” as household managers and casual spies. Berridge’s approach is mostly categorical, highlighting various aspects of the institution, such as the importance of “plate” (the ambassador’s tableware) and different embassy styles, from the walled fortress (examples of which include the British “Legation Quarter” built in Beijing after the 1900 Boxer Rebellion and the U.S. “Green Zone” established in Baghdad following the 2003 invasion) to today’s makeshift mini-embassies (basically just an envoy working on a laptop). The narrative also traces a somewhat vague yet informative trajectory of modern diplomacy’s highs and lows, from Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, through “unsavory” Cold War affairs like the U.S. embassy’s role hosting the CIA station that orchestrated the 1973 overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende, to the current rise of “transnational repression” via embassies, like Saudi Arabia’s in London, that surveil and harass dissidents abroad. Crammed with trivia, this will appeal to political history buffs. Illus. (Apr.)